Word has surfaced from a couple sources in China that MediaTek is working on a full 8-core offering, the MT6592 2GHz chipset, which is rumored to begin shipping in the last quarter of this year. If the leaks pan out, this will trump Samsung's Exynos 5 Octa offering in terms of pure core usage, due to the Exynox 5 Octa utilizing big.LITTLE tech with four Cortex-A15 and four Cortex-A7 cores.

This first tip comes from an analyst with HQ Research, Pan Jiutang, who posted on Sina Weibo what he says was a covertly taken shot of MediaTek's roadmap for the upcoming quarters, which you can see in the image above. In the roadmap, the MT6592 octa-core offering is clearly visible under Q4 with a 1.7GHz to 2.0GHz 28nm offering.

This was preceeded by a report over at UDN stating that MediaTek has already shown off the MT6592 chipset to its clients, having begun doing so last week. Reportedly in an AnTuTu benchmark, the 8-core offering neared close to 30,000, and as such won't be trumping Qualcomm's Snapdragon 800. However, considering MediaTek's other options, the price will likely be more budget-friendly.

Along with the MT6592, you can see in the image a quad-core MT6588 1.7GHz chip as well, which falls in the same time bracket, and will perhaps also be seeing a shipping date of sometime in November. According to the folks at Engagdet, both of these chips will be compatible with MediaTek's MT6582 slated for release in the third quarter of this year.

And all of this follows a recent large spat of job openings that surfaced at MediaTek in June. The roadmap shows the MT6290 LTE modem, which was mentioned by the company's chairman Tsai Ming-kai as being slated for launch in 2013's fourth-quarter. Fortunately, we won't have to wait too much longer to find out if the rumors are solid.